Was poking around a thrift shop today (you all know what I was looking for!!), when I came upon a well used Casio graphing calc (I forget the model number...it had a "color" display though). Anyway, it had fresh batteries in it, so I turned it on and played with it a bit. When I went to take the square root of a previous calculation, I was taken aback a bit when I realized it required no less than 5 keystrokes to do so: (2nd, SQRT, 2nd, ANS, EXC). Wow, that's a lot of fanning that keyboard for such a simple operation. Perhaps there's a shorter way to do this that requires fewer keystrokes?

Gee, RPN truly is a wonderful thing.

Hal:}

PS, I didn't buy the machine (it was $15). Had it not been so beat up, I would have.

Have you tried R<>P conversions? When Casio entered the *wonderful* world of VPAM, the y register became unavailable, forcing the user to read a variable to access the second component. On the 4500p, y is stored in register "W".

Was poking around a thrift shop today (you all know what I was looking for!!), when I came upon a well used Casio graphing calc (I forget the model number...it had a "color" display though). Anyway, it had fresh batteries in it, so I turned it on and played with it a bit. When I went to take the square root of a previous calculation, I was taken aback a bit when I realized it required no less than 5 keystrokes to do so: (2nd, SQRT, 2nd, ANS, EXC). Wow, that's a lot of fanning that keyboard for such a simple operation. Perhaps there's a shorter way to do this that requires fewer keystrokes?

Gee, RPN truly is a wonderful thing.

To be fair, to repeat the same operation you only need to press the EXE key.

Also, you can't complain too much about the shifted SQRT key, plenty of calcs (particually graphics like the TI ones) have that.

When Casio moved to the (S)VPAM system you lost the ability to operate directly on the previous X register entry, it has to be specifically recalled with the ANS key and then EXEcuted.
But thankfully you can still buy non-(S)VPAM non-graphic Casio's.